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I.
I don't know the origin of the zen fascist insistence on wishing everyone a happy new year, but I suspect it's rooted in the 18th-century, which is why in 1794 the Archange de la Terreur - Louis de Saint-Just - was able to proclaim: Le bonheur est une idée neuve en Europe ... [1]
Such a new idea of happiness - one concerned with individual fulfilment in the here and now and realised in material form, rather than a deferred condition of soul which awaits the blessed in heaven - had already become an inalienable right of citizens in the United States.
Whether Jefferson was inspired by the English empiricist John Locke - or by the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau - is debatable. But, either way, the pursuit of happiness was declared a self-evidently good thing that all Americans should uphold and practice [2].
It might also be noted that 1776 was the year that Jeremy Bentham famously wrote that ensuring the greatest happiness of the greatest number was the mark of a truly moral and just society [3].
II.
So what's the problem?
Well, the problem for those who take Nietzsche seriously, is that this positing of happiness in its modern form as the ultimate aim of human existence makes one contemptible.
That is to say, one becomes the kind of person who only seeks their own pleasure and safety, avoiding all danger, difficulty, or struggle; one becomes one of those letzter Menschen that Zarathustra speaks of [4].
Nietzsche wants his readers to see that suffering and, yes, even unhappiness, play an important role in life and culture; that greatness is, in fact, more often than not born of pain and sorrow. This is why his philosophy is a form of tragic pessimism.
And this is why it's kind of insulting to wish a Nietzschean happy new year ... [5] [6]
Notes
[1] Louis de Saint-Just made this remark in a speech to the National Convention entitled Sur le mode d'exécution du décret contre les ennemis de la Révolution (3 March 3, 1794) - only four months before he went to the guillotine, aged 26, along with his friend and fellow revolutionary Robespierre.
[2] The famous line written by Thomas Jefferson in the 1776 Declaration of Independence reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
[3] This phrase - often wrongly attributed to J. S. Mill - can be found in the Preface to Bentham's A Fragment on Government (1776).
[4] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Zarathustra's Prologue', 5.
[5] Similarly, one should refrain from wishing happy new year to a devotee of Larry David; or, at any rate, be aware that there's a cut off after which it's no longer appropriate to do so. See episode 1 of season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, entitled 'Happy New Year' (dir. Jeff Schaffer): click here.
[6] Having said that, see the post published on 1 Jan 2016 entitled 'Sanctus Januarius' for a Nietzschean new year's message: click here.
As with most things he thought about, Nietzsche had complex if not contradictory things to say about happiness. Of course, a main target to him was Benthamite utlitarianism - 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' - and the idealistic foolishness of its hedonic calculi that so grossly overlooked the law of unintended consequence, aka the unconscious. But it was really happiness as an end point, rather than an epiphenomoneon of (tragic) action and energised will, that he opposed: 'Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again.' So, if 'Happy New Year' is really a humane wish rather than some of kind of 'fascist' or 'Zen' imposition (!), I think my noble friend can relax a little and cut well-meaning strangers some slack. He might even want to put on ABBA's wonderfully melancholy (and arguably itself rather Nietzschean) 'Happy New Year' if he can bear to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uo0JAUWijM&ab_channel=AbbaVEVO ('Happy new year, happy new year / May we all have a vision now and then /
ReplyDeleteOf a world where every neighbour is a friend / May we all have our hopes, our will to try / If we don't we might as well lay down and die /You and I'). Here's to a high-striving 2023!
PS Might Nietzsche, as a philosopher of the will, have been more sympatheic to the tradition of New Year resolutions?
ReplyDeleteMaybe. (Was Nietzsche a philosopher of the will?)
DeleteIn a letter to his mother in 1864, he claims to love New Year's Eve and other such occasions when 'the soul can stand still and review a phase of its own development'. At such moments, he adds, crucial resolutions can be made.